XDA

Although many Denver Post readers may think that Saturday columnist David Sirota is left wing fringe each week in the Post, they ain't heard nothing yet, to channel Al Jolson, until they have read the extremely left wing fringe stuff he writes at the Huffington Post, such as this piece today. Illuminating.

There are at least two hallmarks of the extremely far lefty writer in the posting. Here's the first:

Second, Jones being forced out will not mollify the racists, crazies, tea baggers, Republican congresspeople and other assorted conservative freakshows - it will only embolden them. When lynch mobs in the Old South lynched someone, when a witchhunting band caught a target in Salem, when HUAC "proved" the supposed communism of its victims, that didn't calm them down - it only intensified their bloodlust because it made them believe they could be even more successful in the future.

This paragraph is known in military circles as a target rich environment. First there is the name calling of Mr. Jones' critics on the right, from racist to crazy to freakshow. This is an unfortunate turn in a piece purportedly to defend the former Green Jobs Czar from name calling, but perhaps emotion has overtaken Mr. Sirota's ability at self control. Emotion over reason is indeed a tell tale of the left.

Then there is the lumping of three different groups in an equivalency of wrongness. Again, this is standard rhetoric under the left's overlaying layer of historical ignorance. The Democrat Party members, who were the KKK back when white men lynched black men 50 year ago in the South, are equated with the Massachusetts religious officials who hanged people at the end of the 17th Century for consorting with Satan. How are these even similar? It's not that the Massachusetts residents couldn't get along with the real witches they discovered living among them (although Diomedes might believe this to be true). Nor is it true that success at hanging black men in the South, many of them innocent of hanging offenses, and hanging innocent white so called witches in the North led to more of the same. Salem is the end of the Witch gynocide, not the beginning. Lynchings peaked in the late 19th Century and slowly dwindled in the first half of the 20th. What is Sirota thinking to say that these particular killings "intensified their blood lust"? Is he really that ignorant of real history? I suspect that question answers itself.

Then he equates the HUAC Communist "witch hunters" with the Salem hysteria. No, Mr. Sirota, the HUAC found a lot of real live Communists, as the Venona intercepts and, indeed, the now partially-open-to-us Soviet spy archives make perfectly clear. There was very little false proving of Communist affiliation, as your challenge quotes imply. Real Communists. False witches in Salem. Many innocent blacks hanged, by Democrats, in the South. None of these have anything intrinsically in common.

Here is the second hallmark, the race card:

...the fact that the right chose to mount a hysteria campaign specifically around an African American, Jones, was no coincidence. The right didn't just randomly pick some mid-level guy working on noncontroversial issues (green jobs) - they were specifically looking for a black guy with movement politics in his background.[...] Hence, we can be assured the original targeting of Jones was a calculated move with race in mind - a move designed to fit the criticism into a larger racial backlash framework first perfected in the 1980s. That framework has created a simple reality: In America, governmental advancement is wide open for right-wing movement players, and you can even vaguely hope for a seat at the political table if you are a white progressive former hippe-turned-yuppie liberal. But if you are a black person with any enduring loyalty to progressive movement or social justice activism, the loud and clear message from politicians and the media is that you are not welcome anywhere near the halls of power, because you will be billed as some nefarious combination of Al Sharpton, Huey Newton, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and Willie Horton.

Wow, another target rich environment.

Van Jones' race has nothing whatever to do with his being a former manager of the Obama agenda, just as Skip Gates' race had nothing at all to do with his being contacted by Sgt. Crowley. It is merely a coincidence that this far lefty loon is African American (and really, becoming a Communist, after the Soviet Union fails and falls apart and Communism only exists in a few very backwards places, like North Korea and Harvard University, tells you all you need to know about Mr. Jones' judgment). No one picked him out to quote (and wonder WTF at) because he was black. He came to the blogosphere's attention because he was a completely loony lefty who was appointed by President Obama to be one of the 30 plus czars in his administration.

The only people apparently Mr. Sirota admires are these lefty, late to Communism, America hating, race card playing, completely into victim status, historically ignorant, bleeding heart, conspiracy theory embracing loons whom Sirota calls "movement progressives." And look at the list to which he imagines the right has added Van Jones: Huey Newton, founder of the Black Panthers, was convicted of cop killing (later overturned) and embezzling from the Panthers and was murdered by a young black drug dealer; Stokely Carmichael, founder of SNCC, had to distance himself from the Panthers by fleeing to Guinea; Willie Horton is a murderer and rapist without any political context; Malcolm X was a revolutionary Black Muslim follower murdered by other Black Muslims, and Al Sharpton resembles most closely a pimp dealing in racial grievances rather than sex. Is this a list of the people of color Sirota admires as well? Is it supposedly the nightmare list for white Republicans? Is it a list of other victims, like Jones? I just can't tell.

What I can tell is that David Sirota is further to the left than almost everyone this side of Michael Moore, and it is of some importance that he is so harsh on the Obama Administration, accusing it even, as strange as this is, of what Mr. Carmichael would have called institutional racism. Very instructive.

UPDATE: Sirota had some TV time on Labor Day and called Van Jones a national hero and Glenn Beck a political terrorist. Later he called the Republican Party a bunch of psychopaths. Stay classy, David.

Labels: DAvid Sirota; Van Johnson; Historical Ignorance; Race Card